[FoRK] Re: Patent madness

[Adam L Beberg]

Jeffrey Winter wrote on 4/10/2008 3:36 PM:
> http://www.google.com/patents?id=_twLAAAAEBAJ&dq=6418462
> 
> The patent sounds more like it targets SETI-at-Home, Map/Reduce
> type services: distributing computation amongst many clients
> and the collection of results at a central hub.

1999 filing date, so they only missed the system described by 26 years - 
at least that's the age range of the stuff I always cite, but only 
because I cannot get copies of the stuff from the 1950-60's anymore.

The brilliance of this patent is first it's obscene lag of the state of 
the art, also that they seem to have thought up a cluster-scheduler 
(their "sideband" which is just `rsh`) only 50-some years after the rest 
of the CS field, and for the hat-trick, that in 1999, systems doing that 
were all over the place.

Awesome.

-- 
Adam L. Beberg
http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/